The next issue of Amarok Insider has been released, along with lots of screenshots. It takes an in-depth look at Amarok's visual theme, Plasma-centric technologies, Web services, and MacOS X integration. It also discusses pending Amarok releases, talks about past and future events, and interviews some crazy Amarok fans. Enjoy!

Comments

I know Amarok is a complex program with a heap of features, but I'm not sure about the screenshots - they seem somewhat cluttered. I like the current (1.4) layout, because it focuses on what Amarok does - play music.

What exactly is that you find cluttering the interface? Browsers and Context View can be hidden, and playlist switched to classic mode. Also, each individual service can be disabled from the configuration dialog. Lastly, don't forget that the artwork is still in constant flux, and is heading towards simplicity.

That was problem when user wanted more than 4-5 colums on amarok window without keeping it fullscreen.

But it still was better in one important way. Showing the info of music.
1.4.x series playlist could be full of different albums, artist etc and it was short one and very simple to use. But Amarok2 playlist is made for whole albums, not for random songs. When I add 20-30 songs what are mostly, if not all, from different artist and albums, I have very long and hard to control-playlist on my screen. But if I add 5-8 CD from database, it's nice and good because I have only a 5-8 artist tab there what I can hide or show.

This is one reason why I dont like new Amarok playlist.

Other reason is that playlist is on right edge and database on left edge and I need to drag files from left to right side. On 1.4.x series I can just do small mouse movement to get them dropped easily to that place on playlist I like.

I hope that Middle place (plasmoids) can be removed so Playlist could get bigger again, or at least switch the playlist from right to middle.

> I think the feel of clutter is due to the high amount of (different and nested)
> visual borders. See the attached picture were I highlighted plenty
> (but not all) borders with red.

From a dev's perspective, it's easier to forget about borders than to make the finishing touches and disable them. Of course, this isn't helped by the fact that widgets have borders around them by default.

On the attached screenshot I've highlighted more suggestions for improving the consistency of Amarok. Specifically, eliminating the subtle yet needless and ugly color gradients between different areas, eliminating the useless separator at the top of the Plasma panel, and eliminating the horizontal scrollbar when in fact nothing is overflowing to the right.

Also, I think there should be no space between the scrollbar and the box it controls. The Mac OS X style seems to get this right by not inserting a space:

Hmmm... Perhaps the different parts of the interface should not look like if they were "stamped in" (eingestanzt, you know what I mean) but merely stick out. I don't know if that's a theme-specific issue or a general design question.

please calm down.. you're a bit overreacting here. it's very much a valid point to point out some shortcomings with the (early) windows port of KDE+Amarok. And the style of writing suggests it was shurely not meant as a rude bashing...

It especially doesn't have much to do with Amarok, since I bet phonon-ds9 backend does have proxy support since its using DirectX. So you could play streams fine. (though web services would be b0rked).

Microsoft's internal mantra is "eat your own dogfood", which means if you write code/a program, then you need to use it - you can't expect others to, if you don't. It's good to know the Amarok team use v2 on a daily basis, let's hope they spot the obscure bugs too and not just the obvious ones ;-)

Is it possible to skin/theme Amarok 2 to make it look like 1.4, just for the old school people?

To be honest, I don't really like the current look in SVN. However, it's getting there; the sliders are quite nice-looking. :)

I think it's all the shininess my eyes don't like. As someone said, it looks cluttered. The new ui also lack "sharpness", unfortunately I can't really describe what that means. But I'm sure it'll improve over time.

If I have some free time tonight I might try to make a small mockup. Not a new theme I'm afraid, as I don't know SVG very well.

Oh, a final question: are the toolbars configurable? I never use the stop button, and just prev/play/next looks imo much better.